"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

Five years ago, I ummed and ahhed over Monsoon or Tiger Mountain branded coffees. They were savoury, dusty, baggy and cigar-like — and I wasn’t quite sure whether I liked them or not. All I knew was that they blended poorly, had a very bubbly crema and required a very different grind setting to most of the other coffees I was using. Fast track forward five years and I’m no longer a fan of these coffees. Sounds harsh, but those coffees were just that: harsh! Now that the global quality standard has rapidly increased, the old-style Indian coffees just don’t stand a chance against the super sweet and refined coffees of today. That’s pretty much all I knew about Indian coffees, until my recent visit to India, that is.

This is the simple story told to me along the way by different farmers as I travelled through the coffee growing regions of South India. I’m sure there are different interpretations, but this is theirs … which explained many things for me.

As we travel through the Chikmagalur region of Karnataka, my ears perk up when I am told of the Brother Baba Budan hills. We all know Mark Dundan’s hole-in-the-wall cafe on Little Bourke St. in Melbourne is named after this fellow, and so I asked my Indian friends to tell me his story. They told me he was a 17th century Sufi pilgrim who brought back seven coffee seeds from the port of Mocha in Yemen and planted them in these hills. This was the start of the coffee industry in India, and Brother Baba Budan is well recognised for it.

Fast forward a couple of centuries, and the Indians note the British Colonial influence on organised, commercial coffee. As the world embraced coffee and it lost its superstitious reputation as ‘Satan’s drink’, colonial traders quickly realised its commercial potential and value. Small land holdings grew into large organised estates, which were British owned and managed, with Indian workers tending to the daily business of cultivating and harvesting. At some point, India was hit hard by coffee leaf rust, a coffee tree fungus that spreads and greatly reduces yields for several years by reducing foliage, disturbing photosynthesis and consequently flowering and production. It can actually kill the trees all together. This ‘wave’ of coffee rust in India led to many of the old varietals being replaced by more rust resistant plants, lots of which ended up being Robusta … this was somewhere in the 19th century.

It sounds like everything progressed nicely from then on until the depression hit (in the 1930’s) and coffee business was, for the first time since the rust epidemic, in real trouble. It was around this time that the Coffee Board of India (ICB) was born; things changed from this point forward. With war creating difficulties on the trade routes, farmers started selling their coffee to the ICB, who then marketed and re-sold their coffees for them. It sounds like this system worked very well for many years, and helped growers through a very challenging era.

However, somewhere along the line, the option of selling coffee to the ICB became law and suddenly there was no longer any choice about whether to market your own coffee or not. Farmers speak of being forced to sell all their coffee via the ICB even until quite recently. In modern times, with the tantalising prospect of featuring in the world coffee market, this left farmers who wanted to excel, at a distinct disadvantage. They had no guarantee of payment, were not rewarded for quality and all their coffees were blended and sold as a bulked lot. All this meant that they had no opportunity to market themselves as individual growers. The farmers talk of having to apply to keep ‘even a couple of kilos’ of their own coffee for personal consumption, as well of their woeful lack of understanding of what the world’s top end coffee consumers were looking for. I am talking here about Indian farmers, as these estates are now all Indian-run and managed. It sounds as if most of the British managers left somewhere in the 50’s or 60’s … and many of the farms were then handed over to loyal employees.

The estates I visited are all well preserved, with immaculate landscapes, complete with English-style guest houses and clubhouses. I don’t know the exact date, but in recent times, this monopoly over the sale of Indian coffee finally came to an end, and Indian farmers have spent the last 15 or so years learning about opportunities in the world coffee market. For some of them, this has meant travel and for others it has meant inviting coffee travellers into their homes; but mostly, they have kept an open mind and are now entering an era where they are unlocking the true potential of their coffees and what they have to offer the world.

Many, many good things came out of India from this point forward … the big, salty, old crop Monsoons were replaced with heavy, syrupy, spicy, jammy, clean, bold coffees … a huge improvement that has completely changed my opinion about what India has to offer. But tasting is believing, so order a bag of our current Indian, the Veer Attikan, and see for yourself.